Post-Concert Ramblings…

I wrote this yesterday morning on Facebook. I’m posting it here now. Does anyone know if there’s a simpler way of syndicating Facebook notes and WordPress blogs?

So it’s currently 6:08 AM and I’ve been up for the last forty-five minutes. Last night we went to the Rock and Worship Tour concert at the US Cell Center in CR and now we’re staying at Kristen’s parents’ house in Mount Vernon. And I can’t sleep–I think I’m catching a cold slash my lips are burning. And not burning with the desire to share the Word of God or to sing some incredibly artsy creative song, no, I have two canker sores (sp?) on the inside of my mouth and they feel extra awesome [sarcasm] in the wee hours of the morning.

At any rate, I stole one of Kristen’s guitars and snuck away to their computer room for a little late night acousticness (I’m in denial that it is, in fact early morning. Side note: I’m looking out the window and it’s getting light outside… eew). I kind of feel bad about using their computer without asking. :S

Anyways, the concert was amazing… I tend to go into Christian events with thick skepticism, because I know a lot of people put on Christian events because it’s “what good Christians do” or because “kids who are involved in Christian activities don’t sin” etc.; however, I was comforted by the brief ‘tween-acts blurbs by the lead singers of Tenth Ave North, Mercy Me, and Sanctus Real. I don’t worship well if I don’t believe that those who are leading worship have their hearts in a good place. I don’t want to feel like I’m being conned into some manufactured emotion. If my faith is fake, I’ll happily be an honest Atheist rather than a lying Christian.

The first thing the T.A.N. guy said was how he was still working through the complications of growing up in a “Christian” community and attending a “Christian” school (by the way, I use quotes around that word, because it means a lot of different things to different people and the way I’m using it isn’t really how I think it should be used), and he touched on how we “Christians” approach our relationships with people and with God with a lot more arrogance and false-humility than we should… He said the hardest three words for Christians to say are “I don’t know”, which was said in jest but bears a lot of truth. Anyways, the overall theme of the evening was that we’re all broken people desperately in need of a God who loves us. None of us are better than anyone else. Basically, as Bethany and Derek and I phrase it, we’re all epic failures and the only way we succeed is because Jesus loves us enough to succeed for us. And that to me, far more than trendy “Christian” music and Alt-Christian clothes and even being in the presence of “Christian” music superstars, was cool.

So with that I sit here with a lot of thoughts swirling around in my tiny human brain… First of all, I wish that more Christians really believed that we [read "all humanity"] are all the same in terms of worthiness of Grace (in that we are all equally unworthy of His Grace).

Secondly, I wish people who don’t know Jesus wouldn’t associate Him with us Christians. I’ll elaborate on that one a little: Christians can be prideful and arrogant and falsely-humble and hurtful and a variety of other negatively-inclined adjectives that are in no way characteristics of Jesus nor are representative of his feelings towards humanity in general. We’ve taken His name in vain and dragged it through the mud with us and the result is that the people who are aware of their need for a savior won’t know that that person is Jesus because we’ve made Jesus look like the Devil.

Finally, and this is one that I (as an insecure person) struggle with the most; I wish that we who call ourselves followers of Christ would truly meet people where they’re at rather than lead them to believe that they need to be “good enough” to earn our and/or God’s Love. Especially God’s Love. I think we non-verbally tell people that they need to fit in and look the part before we will accept them. They need to cover up their tattoos, change the way they dress, and stop associating with their non Christian friends unless they are getting [read "pressuring"] them to come to Church.

Just so we’re all clear on this, I believe this next statement so strongly that if this isn’t true, I’m converting to Atheism straight up: God’s love for us is not affected by our performance, and if it were, we’d all be effed. There is no reason for God to Love us–we can’t earn it, it’s freely given. We can’t trick God into Loving us, he already does–we just need to accept it. God’s people aren’t shiny and plastic; God chose a people who are real and broken and scandalous and perfect only in our inability to earn His love. He knows this about each of us and this fact is deeply rooted in His passionate, reckless, scandalous, foolish, intoxicated Love for each of us.

Anyways, it’s 6:53 now and the sun is coming up and that’s an event I haven’t witnessed in roughly a decade so I don’t want to ruin such a good track record. I’m going back to bed. Good night. Or good morning. Whatever.

So it’s currently 6:08 AM and I’ve been up for the last forty-five minutes. Last night we went to the Rock and Worship Tour concert at the US Cell Center in CR [Cedar Rapids] and now we’re staying at Kristen’s parents’ house in Mount Vernon. And I can’t sleep–I think I’m catching a cold slash my lips are burning. And not burning with the desire to share the Word of God or to sing some incredibly artsy creative song, no, I have two canker sores (sp?) on the inside of my mouth and they feel extra awesome [sarcasm] in the wee hours of the morning.

At any rate, I stole one of Kristen’s guitars and snuck away to their computer room for a little late night acousticness (I’m in denial that it is, in fact early morning. Side note: I’m looking out the window and it’s getting light outside… eew). I kind of feel bad about using their computer without asking. :S

Anyways, the concert was amazing… I tend to go into Christian events with thick skepticism, because I know a lot of people put on Christian events because it’s “what good Christians do” or because “kids who are involved in Christian activities don’t sin” etc.; however, I was comforted by the brief ‘tween-acts blurbs by the lead singers of Tenth Ave North, Mercy Me, and Sanctus Real. I don’t worship well if I don’t believe that those who are leading worship have their hearts in a good place. I don’t want to feel like I’m being conned into some manufactured emotion. If my faith is fake, I’ll happily be an honest Atheist rather than a lying Christian.

The first thing the T.A.N. guy said was how he was still working through the complications of growing up in a “Christian” community and attending a “Christian” school (by the way, I use quotes around that word, because it means a lot of different things to different people and the way I’m using it isn’t really how I think it should be used), and he touched on how we “Christians” approach our relationships with people and with God with a lot more arrogance and false-humility than we should… He said the hardest three words for Christians to say are “I don’t know”, which was said in jest but bears a lot of truth. Anyways, the overall theme of the evening was that we’re all broken people desperately in need of a God who loves us. None of us are better than anyone else. Basically, as Bethany and Derek and I phrase it, we’re all epic failures and the only way we succeed is because Jesus loves us enough to succeed for us. And that to me, far more than trendy “Christian” music and Alt-Christian clothes and even being in the presence of “Christian” music superstars, was cool.

So with that I sit here with a lot of thoughts swirling around in my tiny human brain… First of all, I wish that more Christians really believed that we [read "all humanity"] are all the same in terms of worthiness of Grace (in that we are all equally unworthy of His Grace).

Secondly, I wish people who don’t know Jesus wouldn’t associate Him with us Christians. I’ll elaborate on that one a little: Christians can be prideful and arrogant and falsely-humble and hurtful and a variety of other negatively-inclined adjectives that are in no way characteristics of Jesus nor are representative of his feelings towards humanity in general. We’ve taken His name in vain and dragged it through the mud with us and the result is that the people who are aware of their need for a savior won’t know that that person is Jesus because we’ve made Jesus look like the Devil.

Finally, and this is one that I (as an insecure person) struggle with the most; I wish that we who call ourselves followers of Christ would truly meet people where they’re at rather than lead them to believe that they need to be “good enough” to earn our and/or God’s Love. Especially God’s Love. I think we non-verbally tell people that they need to fit in and look the part before we will accept them. They need to cover up their tattoos, change the way they dress, and stop associating with their non Christian friends unless they are getting [read "pressuring"] them to come to Church.

Just so we’re all clear on this, I believe this next statement so strongly that if this isn’t true, I’m converting to Atheism straight up: God’s love for us is not affected by our performance, and if it were, we’d all be effed. There is no reason for God to Love us–we can’t earn it, it’s freely given. We can’t trick God into Loving us, he already does–we just need to accept it. God’s people aren’t shiny and plastic; God chose a people who are real and broken and scandalous and perfect only in our inability to earn His love. He knows this about each of us and this fact is deeply rooted in His passionate, reckless, scandalous, foolish, intoxicated Love for each of us.

Anyways, it’s 6:53 now and the sun is coming up and that’s an event I haven’t witnessed in roughly a decade so I don’t want to ruin such a good track record. I’m going back to bed. Good night. Or good morning. Whatever.

Rick Warren

Edit: Shit. Not five minutes after I wrote this did I see that Tink has already spoken on the topic and, being far more deep, intellectual, and insightful than myself, his write up is pretty amazing. If you don’t want to read a lot, just read his. Don’t even read mine. Seriously. Link.

PS: Tell me if that link doesn’t work and I’ll copy/paste the contents in here.

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Edit2: On the topic, I just came across this little piece of awesome.

 

Open mouth. Insert foot.

 

 

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Dammit. My keyboard is in French again.éèÉ^çà Okay. So there’s a lot of controversy surrounding this Rick Warren guy. The conservatives tend bash him because he won’t be ignorant and the liberals bash him because they’re confused about how a person can be Christian and still be tolerant or how a person can disagree with another group’s viewpoints and still respect them (specifically the pro-homosexual movement, a part of which Mr. Warren decidedly is not).

I think it’s funny. Mostly because after researching Mr. Warren from a skeptical perspective (the guy is the author of the book “Purpose Driven Life”, which is embraced by many “Christians” in my area and that is generally enough to make me skeptical; then add to that the fact that he’s the pastor of a super church and I become even more skeptical), I came to realize that he seems to be more tolerant and open-minded than most liberals and that confuses them a lot. And he’s also more fundamental (in the sense that he does what Jesus did) than most conservative “Fundamentalists”. (Actually, in my experience, conservative Fundamentalists have always been opposed to the real person of Jesus just like the religious people in Jesus’ time were opposed to Him). So to me, the fact that the conservatives are against him is no surprise but the fact that the liberals are against him is amusing.

Probably my favorite thing about Mr. Warren is that he actually does what he preaches. Look here:

Warren survives the pounding partly because of his personal integrity. He donates 90 percent of his many millions in book royalties back to the church. He says he stopped taking a salary from Saddleback six years ago. No scandals have tainted his ministry.

Also, Warren is doing his part to fight AIDS in the most destitute places in the world. And more than that, he has enough faith in God that he is secure in partnering with non-Christian organizations who also want to be Jesus-like (even though they may not know it) to the poorest people in the world.

Moreover, the fact that he is mature and confident in his political views enough to host an unbiased bi-partisan conference is pretty amazing to me (given my stigma against wealthy pastors). It seems like both He and Obama are actually interested in the causes in which they claim to be interested (as opposed to just wanting to be seen as right or correct) enough to partner with eachother to overcome partisan ignorance. I feel like anyone who hates politics for all of its two-faced-ness and blame-game-playing-ness should love both of these guys. As the above article points out:

It is no surprise that he and Obama have become friendly. Each tries to operate outside a strict liberal-conservative divide, and has risked angering his supporters to do so.

So I’m going to give you some vids to watch and chew on because I’ve found that I respect this guy a lot, even though I don’t necessarily agree perfectly with his views of homosexuality–he genuinely is seeking the truth and not using the Bible as an excuse to hate a group of people.

And watch the video at the top of this page. It’s good. I specifically like what he thinks about Fundamentalism.

PS: “We believe in the separation of Church and state, but we do not believe in the separation of faith and politics.” – Rick Warren at the 2008 Presidential Forum at Saddleback Church. Now I’m going to post this before I watch the rest of that damn video or I’ll end up regurgitating it to you verbatim.

Peace!

Abrasive?

So I’m becoming a more abrasive person. I’ve always been passive-aggressive so that’s not saying a ton, but I’m learning to be more confrontational. I think it’s interesting to note that this is because I’m telling more truths and fewer lies and the nature of the truth is that it tends to rub people the wrong way. Or at least imperfect people. But mostly religious imperfect people, I think, because we trick ourselves into thinking we’re perfect so as to elevate ourselves, but real truth shames us. Truth knocks people down a few pegs. Having said that, I agree with roughly 98 percent of what this guy says on these interviews. More than that, I admire that he doesn’t neatly package the truth so as to make it offend us religious folks less. We need to be offended. Badly.

Part1
Part2

Enjoy.

PS: I found out about this via WorD.

Truth

My facebook status currently reads “Craig is learning about Truth.” Last week, Craig was learning about Love. It’s interesting to note that I couldn’t tell you when I stopped learning about Love and started learning about Truth. This is because, I think, the two flow together seamlessly. Just like all themes of Christianity (except it seems to me that good themes flow together on an opposite pole from bad themes like selfishness, pridefulness, and dishonesty).

Anyways, I’ve learned a lot about truth and about the lies I tell myself lately. It’s been an amazing past couple of weeks as I’ve realized that the truth is convicting to those of us who are perfect. It, like exercise to the body, makes us feel good about ourselves in a healthy fashion, unlike lies which, like sweets and excessive video gaming, are instantly gratifying and pleasurable. My decreasing fear of the Truth has caused me to put more of myself into relationships (that is, make myself more vulnerable in conversation–giving my friend power over me in a sense) which has yeilded fruit in the form of more trusting relationships and friends who are willing to tell me intimate details of their lives so that I can have something of them to love and protect. Truth is amazing.

Anyways, I regard everything pro-Christian with extreme skepticism as I’ve found more-often-than-not the case is that these slogans, movies, policies, etc are driven by hateful intentions and seek to elevate Christians above other social groups. This is the worst place for Christians. Christianity is good, but it should never be powerful in worldly ways. As such, it should not successfully be attractive to the world as many Churches try to make it (however, the opposite–that which is unattractive or boring is Godly–is not necessarily true).

All of this was going to point to a quote that I saw, but it’s deeper than I can really grasp so I won’t comment on what I don’t understand. But the above pretty much points to what I thought it meant. :p

Christian Pride

I think a lot of people are proud to be Christians. Like Christianity is our sports team and we must defend it against fans of a rival sports team or something. I mean, we really seem to enjoy “sticking it to the non-Christians”. I feel like we all celebrate when we’ve overpowered and humiliated the group of people who haven’t discovered what we’ve discovered. I think we try to laugh and celebrate when “Christian” legislation gets passed or when some anti-Christian activist gets “what’s coming to him”. We really view this thing as a culture war.

I got an email from my mom earlier this week (it was a forward) in which the original author (Jim Neugent) says (I don’t know if it’s true or not, I certainly hope it isn’t) that he was watching a TV show that was supportive of homosexuality and so he emailed the broadcasting company chewing them out for their lack of support for Christian morals. He got back a tersely worded response from an employee, who was later fired for responding impolitely. The rest of the email celebrates “the triumph of the Christian over the non-Christian”. One of my favorite parts is in the middle of the argument when Jim says this: “Thanks for your reply. From your harsh reply, evidently I hit a nerve. I will share it with all with whom I come in contact. Hopefully, the ArkansasDemocrat Newspaper will include it in one of their columns and I will be praying for you.“

Go Christians! Fight for Jesus!

Do we believe that the reason God died on a cross was because he forgot that he was almighty and could force us to be “good little Christians”? I think we, like Jim, pretend that the Bible doesn’t have passages like The Parable of The Pharisee and The Tax Collector so that we can feel more superior than these “sinners” (or “let the sinless throw the first stone” or “the first will be last and the last will be first” or “love your enemies” or “remove the plank from your own eye” or a host of other things Jesus said). I’m not a pastor or anything, but I can’t think of a single time where Jesus sided with the religious folks over the “sinners” when the two groups came into conflict. I think he still operates the same today. It’s just that the “religous folks” who are trying to speak for Him have a different label: Christian. And the more we try to speak for God without a loving, humble heart, the more we will be sticking our “Christian” feet in our “Christian” mouths, I’m quite convinced. Jesus is very inconvenient for us self-righteous religious folks.

Even when we Christians win an argument, we still lose. That’s the nature of the Gospel. The only way to win in God’s economy, is to make sure that you lose to your opponent. To put them before yourself. To Love them as Jesus Loves us.

I think if I elaborate more on this I’ll just be rambling. So go and think about this if you haven’t already. Maybe read the Bible and look at how very often this notion is supported, especially by Jesus.

I’ll pray for you self-righteous Christians. Haha, just kidding.

EDIT: A few hours after having finished this, I’m reading Blue Like Jazz (for the second time around–I’m reading Emily’s copy and I’m using more ink underlining stuff than the publisher did printing the words themselves). I just got to this part I’d like to share with you:

Context: Donald Miller is recollecting a time in his college where him and his Christian friends were going to set up a confession booth in the middle of their very anti-Christian campus. The catch is that they aren’t accepting confessions, but confessing. Confessing to the campus all the ways that we Christians screw things up. He writes this about himself, but I feel it is a good summary of what I spent some four paragraphs trying to get across:

For so much of my life I had been defending Christianity because I thought to admit that we had done any wrong was to discredit the religious system as a whole, but it isn’t a religious system, it is people following Christ; and the important thing to do, the right thing to do, was to apologize for getting in the way of Jesus.

He also writes this, which I agree with 200%:

Tony the Beat Poet says the church is like a wounded animal these days. He says we used to have power and incluence, but now we don’t, and so many of our leaders are upset about this and acting like spoiled children, mad because we they can’t have their way. They disguise their actions to look as though they are standing on principle, but it isn’t that, Tony says, it’s bitterness. They want to take their ball and go home because they have to sit the bench. Tony and I agreed that what God wants us to do is sit the bench in humility and turn the other cheek like Gandhi, like Jesus. We decided that the correct place to share our faith was from a place of humility and love, not from a desire for power.

I freaking love this book. Damn.